The Good Doctor

by Paul Butler

  Grenfell’s face burned. He let his gaze fall momentarily on the white tablecloth beyond the photograph. “Really?” he said, picking up his coffee cup absent-mindedly.

  Perrin said the name. “It’s quite common, apparently, this form of hoax. He married a nurse at the same London hospital, has a practice in rural New England. They work together.”

  Grenfell laid the photograph down and sipped his coffee.

  “Well?” prompted Perrin. “Is it the same person? Do you recognize him?”

  “Perhaps. It’s so long ago.”

  Grenfell smiled, picked up the photograph again, and returned it to Perrin. Perrin frowned, opened his jacket, and slid the photograph back inside his pocket. The poor man had been expecting outrage but had received only a feeble kind of uncertainty. Grenfell gazed at a passing trolley with a rattling tea set. The oddest thing, he reflected, was that it wasn’t only fear that had prevented him from confirming his rival’s identity; it was also a strange kind of loyalty. It took confidence to be so daring, to lay oneself at the mercy of the law and of the ridicule which would follow capture. Florence, he had already noticed, had a boundless kind of confidence. Now he had to credit his rival as well.

  But the humbling element of the story went even deeper. From all that he knew of Florence and her husband, he could not believe they had acted merely for shekels. They were too complicated for that. There had to be some other motive, however obscure. And, as they were in disguise, that motive could have nothing to do with personal glory. The question was deeply troubling. Who would put themselves into such danger when there was no promise of financial or personal gain? And why?

  ***

  Fresh dust scatters upon the newly stirring wind. Anne’s urn tips upside down in his hand. His wife is gone now and no pictures have been taken. Something tugs in his chest, a knotty, confused kind of terror which hauls in turn at every thought and experience. Regardless of the camera-shy reporters, he has achieved all that he set out to achieve. His name will surely be remembered. But something else has been lost, or perhaps never possessed to begin with. He knows suddenly why Florence and her husband have come into his thoughts: faith.

  Florence Mills placed her faith in an intern with his very few prospects and his obvious weakness for drink. At the time, the young nurse’s rejection of Grenfell had been too unexpected even to consider in any light other than an act of temporary madness. But she had seen something, after all, recognized something in his rival, despite his pathetic reliance on whisky and the most slobbering, abject side of religion. Florence and the helpless young man had both prostrated themselves before a shrine. And the act of submission was the key; a part of him had seen that, even at the time. Submission means the giving away of everything, all carefully laid plans, all ambitions. The intern prostrated himself under Moody’s tent; Florence prostrated herself before the intern. Their lives were no longer their own.

  Envy is a foreign emotion to Grenfell, but he knows this must be the feeling burning inside him now. He envies his dead wife for her decades of selfless work. He envies Florence and the other young intern with a passion that terrifies him. If he’s right about their motivations, the reality of it reverses every perception his life’s work has been at pains to create. He envies the three of them—his wife, Florence, and her husband—because they have willingly given their lives to some cause greater than themselves.

  Let go, said Florence, her eyes defiant, as she brandished the wrist captured in his hand. There had been so much certainty in her then, it was chilling. Let go of what? More than Florence’s wrist.

  Suddenly the disinterest of the reporters is too much. His fingers go numb and the empty urn drops and rolls upon the gravel. He doesn’t notice the strength departing his knees, but he feels himself fall and smarts at the impact of the ground upon his knees. A moan comes from his lips, a wolf-like, primal, juddering sound he doesn’t recognize as himself. His breaths are shallow, and the breeze teases strands of his hair.

  He senses furtive movement on the rock ridge below, a scrabble of pebbles, a slow, cautious approach. The collapse isn’t caused by his heart. The checklist is well enough known to him by now. No tightness in the chest, no tingling sensation, vision fine; he can see clearly enough as the Evening Telegram reporter adjusts a strap so his camera is behind his back and therefore out of sight. No, it’s not his heart. It’s merely the panic of accumulated disappointment. This morning, with no one around him, he is an old man on a hill scattering his wife’s ashes, secretly jealous of a woman and man he had always believed himself to despise.

  “Are you all right, Doctor?” calls the man with the camera.

  Another reporter, a local man, scuttles toward him quickly, reaching out with his hand.

  The man’s fingers are warm and reassuring as Grenfell pulls himself back to standing, brushing off his knees. The three of them surround him now, silent, embarrassed, shuffling. The eyes he meets are full of pity and awe and he feels the rush of blood return. The third man reverently bends, picks up the urn, and hands it to him. Grenfell sees his fingers tremble as he takes it.

  Comfortless though the exercise has been, this ending resonates beyond expectations: men on guard, but standing off and distracted; he wishing to call them to witness; they returning finally but only upon a cry of agony. He didn’t plan it this way at all, not consciously. The ashes, his return, and the promise to join his wife had been in his head. But the Biblical overtones, his own personal agony in the garden, these things were all new. Perhaps he has become so expert in weaving his own tale that these intimations of divine suffering unravel from him as dead skin unravels from certain animals, regardless of thought or will. The thought alarms him. He thinks of Anne, disappeared now in the wind, and he feels his blood thicken.

  He nods at the reporters, receives a murmur from one, a sad smile from the other, and a bowed head from the third. They accompany him closely now as he makes his way down the path, rolling tundra in all directions—a ghostly landscape, especially as the wind tugs a solitary bush in the distance. Grenfell feels the spirits of his three hundred reindeer, forever diseased and coughing out their last after all the herders returned to Norway. A piece of distant scrub waves at him, dust flying in its shadow. A failed experiment, some newspapers said. Did they mean the reindeer, or his career? But now he sees it, rising improbably over the barrens and the small community—the hospital, his hospital, a white mausoleum, walls solid and defiant like any large government-run hospital in an imperial outpost.

  It’s a sense of legacy he has always sought. Former Indian governors look at the railways that snake all over the vast peninsula; institutions, modelled on British counterparts, they await the hands which will inevitably inherit. He has his hospital and his people.

  The ground becomes more solid under his feet as they spill out of their homes to greet him now, the women’s handkerchiefs catching the sun. Timorously they form themselves into a welcoming garland around the nearest home’s entrance, feet shuffling as they wait to line the final steps of his journey, handkerchiefs, like palms, lining the way. Only when close does he see the women are crying for him, eyes reddened in brown and windblown flesh. Even little Maggie Evans, whose mother once doubted his story, even she wears a smile of inexpressible sadness at the scene she has witnessed. Small feminine hands touch under his elbows, leading, supporting him through the threshold. The men hold back, physically, eyes cast down like a congregation hearing the liturgy.

  “A cup of tea, Doctor.” The suggestion comes like a blessing, and the women move around him, ministering angels in the muted interior light, guiding him to a soft chair.

  “A good doctor”—he catches the whispered phrase, perhaps from Maggie, who holds some standing as the daughter of his former housekeeper. All suspicions, it seems, have died with Mrs. Evans and her husband. All that is left is the bricks and mortar of progress, and hushed
gratitude.

  Cup and saucer are lowered into his hands.

  “With your permission, Doctor, ladies,” says the Evening Telegram reporter.

  Grenfell nods, and a flash follows, white and startling.

  A triumph, after all, but tears scorch his eyes.

  — Chapter Twenty-Six —

  1940: Massachusetts

  ***

  The garden has come alive in that mysterious way that often occurs in the last weeks of summer. A robin’s call spirals over the tick of the clock and the hum of the refrigerator. Florence looks at the young woman before her, watches her edge the notebook along the table toward her—such an apologetic act, as though she is returning a Christmas present to a respected great-aunt. The poor girl talked about cynicism being a cloak and, of course, she was talking about herself.

  The reverie into which Florence sank lasted seconds, perhaps, but has taken her through so many years, and it has left her as weightless as Lady Grenfell’s dust. Empathy is natural to her, her strength and—no doubt some would say—her downfall. She can’t unknow Willy Grenfell any more than she can unlove her brief memory of him. It is her version of Willy, a half-truth at least. She has imagined his life before, and always with that sense of sadness at a life made slave to ambition. But he, like her husband, is her brother; she is keeper to them both. She thinks of Lady Grenfell’s ashes once more and can’t help but feel Willy’s pain.

  Miss Agar is busy with her satchel. Florence coughs away an emotion quickly and stands, making the poor girl rise as though to attention.

  Miss Agar smiles apologetically, fingering her satchel strap.

  “It’s time to leave,” she says.

  — Chapter Twenty-Seven —

  Grenfell’s note lies on the white leather passenger seat beside Judy. Its spidery blue writing draws her glances more often than any flesh-and-blood travelling companion could have done. On each side of the road dust spirals rise, teased by a wind that seems to tumble over itself in this stretch of open farmland. The drifting dust reminds her of the stories Florence told of starving itinerant farmhands, broken-down shacks, droughts, and bad harvests.

  The doctor and Florence both came as far as the gate to see her off. At first it seemed embarrassing and unbusinesslike, as though she had stepped awkwardly into the role of a family member. An onlooker might have presumed this much had they watched her step into the car and seen the old couple leaning into each other as though for support—Florence, with her bone-thin ankles, the doctor with his tweeds, baggy over his shrunken frame. The doctor wanted to press the scrapbook into her hands, and Judy knew, from her prior conversation with Florence, that this must have been planned in advance, perhaps as soon as Polar Adventures contacted them about an interview.

  Florence whispered to her husband. He nodded, turned his back, opened the scrapbook, and slipped something out. Facing her again, he handed the yellowed sheet to her with the indulgent smile of an old man handing a banknote to his granddaughter.

  Judy took it uncertainly, but with quiet thanks. It was only when she turned the wheel to loop around the lane, pebbles popping under her tires, that she realized the fond goodbye at the gate was not for her, but for Grenfell’s note, a relic of the past that had followed them since the day of their engagement. The thought entered her head that one, or both, of them was dying. Why else would people gladly part with their own history?

  She raised her hand to the window and, quite unexpectedly, felt the tug of separation—the doctor and Florence separating from their past, and perhaps from each other. They waved also as she drew away.

  ***

  She knows she can’t use the note, not with Polar Adventures, and probably not anywhere. War in Europe has cast an oblique and contradictory shadow over everything. All the myths of straightforward virtue, strength, honesty, and courage have never been more in vogue on radio and in print. In motion pictures, Technicolor magic has enveloped the English-speaking world—The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind. The darker the reality, the frothier must be the escape.

  Judy passes a scarecrow. A rusted metal pitchfork sticks out from its chest, and straw pokes from its sleeves and from under its hat. Pulling open the glove compartment, Judy slips out a cigarette and, steering one-handed, lights up. It’s been a hard day’s work for a story that can’t be told.

  Smoke fills the car with the first long exhale, and Judy winds down the driver’s side window an inch to catch the honk of a passing car as she swerves toward the centre of the road. It happens before she’s aware: Grenfell’s note has slipped from the seat and flown out through the window.

  Judy slows, moves onto the hard shoulder. Stones crunch under her tires as she comes to a stop. She winds down the driver’s side window completely and stares out. Behind her is nothing but trees, bushes, and fields of rolling wheat under a cloudless blue sky. Perched on the horizon, the scarecrow stands jagged, straw hands splayed in a gesture of mock innocence.

  A fresh breeze scatters leaves and tiny stones around the car. She gets out, slams the door, and takes a long draw on her cigarette. Grenfell’s note could be in a ditch by now, or up in the branches of a tree half a mile distant. She blows out a puff of smoke which disappears in the breeze. It’s a fairy tale, she thinks, unaware whether she means Grenfell’s story of the ice pan and the dogs or the tale of Florence and her husband. Leaning back against the car, the thought strikes her that it hardly matters. The times dictate which of the versions are acceptable as fact and which would be dismissed as fantasy. Frothy unreality, however, is on Grenfell’s side for now, and perhaps for the foreseeable future.

  A sudden gust of breeze shakes the scarecrow on the horizon. Judy lets her cigarette butt drop on the road, skewers it with her foot, and climbs back into the car.

  — Author’s Note —

  So who, in recorded history, was Wilfred Grenfell?

  Between his arrival in St. Anthony in 1892 and his death in 1940, Wilfred Thomason Grenfell carved himself into the landscape of his adopted home on Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula, and wove himself deeply into the history of the future Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

  Physically brave, stoical, of charitable disposition, but emphasizing the need for pride and self-sufficiency, the “good doctor,” as he became known, embodied the missionary zeal and adventurous spirit of his age.

  The legacy that commands such attention derives from his work initially with the Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, a British organization, through which he set up nursing stations on the Labrador coast, staffed a hospital ship, and later established a fully-equipped modern hospital in St. Anthony. To many who heard of Grenfell’s work, he represented a beacon of civilization and compassion travelling into the darkness of hunger and want. In 1912, he broke away from the mission and set up the International Grenfell Association.

  Praise for Grenfell reached a crescendo sometime between the two world wars. He was knighted by Great Britain in 1928, and in the same year the US publication the North American Review described him as “the most beloved missionary in the world.”

  More than a decade into the twenty-first century, Grenfell—though a controversial figure to some—still looms large in Newfoundland society. The Corner Brook campus of Memorial University of Newfoundland was named Sir Wilfred Grenfell College when founded in 1975 and is still called Grenfell Campus. One of the province’s regional health service providers is called the Labrador Grenfell Health Authority. A statue of Grenfell, with heavy overcoat and doctor’s bag, overlooks Newfoundland and Labrador’s legislature in St. John’s, lending his figure a prominence rivalling that of Newfoundland’s European discoverer, the fifteenth century explorer John Cabot.

  But the essential romance fuelling his fame relies not so much upon medical services, or increments of social change, as upon stirring adventures. Th
e first of these, told many times in his own words, is Grenfell’s conversion under the tent of evangelist D. L. Moody in the East End of London in 1883. A Church of England minister’s son, Grenfell describes how the words of Moody called him to his future work, making him see beyond the “sham and externals of religion . . . a vital call in the world for things that I could do.” A second, even more memorable, incident involved an attempted journey through cracking spring ice from St. Anthony to remote Brent Island in 1908. On his way to save a boy sick of blood poisoning, Grenfell became stuck along with his dog team on a drifting piece of ice.

  To save himself in the freezing temperatures, he tells how he stabbed three of his beloved dogs—Moody, Watch, and Spy—to death, wrapped their hides around his shoulders for warmth, and made windbreaks out of their carcasses. Spotted from the shore and rescued, the doctor, wrapped in bloody animal hides, cut a startling image to those who witnessed his return. His account of the event, Adrift on an Ice-Pan (1909), became, not surprisingly, an international bestseller. Grenfell became the ultimate emblem of “muscular Christianity” espoused by Charles Kingsley, priest and author of Westward Ho!

  ***

  When one person, like Grenfell, writes a memoir there are many constraints. Not least of these is the knowledge that he is planting his own legacy. One eye is on the obvious question what will people think, and the writer is hauled irresistibly into the role of politician.

  The Good Doctor is intended as a tale that should run like an underground river beneath the accepted story of Wilfred Grenfell. Or perhaps it is a story that runs beneath the tale. It’s curious how language conspires to question any claim to objective truth. Story and tale: any series of events, seen through somebody’s eyes, is described with one of those two simple words that imply creation.

  And so it should be.